Mystical systems
Pythagoras
Direct answer
Pythagoras of Samos, who taught at Croton in southern Italy from about 530 BCE, founded a community that held number to be the key to music, the heavens and the soul.
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At a glance
- Also called
- pythagoreans
- Found in
- Mystical Systems
- Related
- Tetractys, Monochord, Music of the Spheres, Quadrivium
Pythagoras of Samos, who taught at Croton in southern Italy from about 530 BCE, founded a community that held number to be the key to music, the heavens and the soul.
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Who was Pythagoras?
Pythagoras was born on the island of Samos about 570 BCE and settled as a grown man at Croton, a Greek city in southern Italy. There he gathered a community that lived by rules of diet, silence and loyalty and that mixed religious teaching with the study of number. He wrote nothing, and his followers credited their own findings to him, so it is hard to say what he himself taught.
Two things are attested early. He taught that the soul is reborn in other bodies, human and animal, a belief his contemporary Xenophanes mocked. And his school held that number underlies harmony and the order of the world. The theorem that carries his name was in use in Babylon about a thousand years before him, and no early source says he proved it.
On the tree of the hidden arts: Sacred geometry.
What sets Pythagoras apart
Pythagoras is unusual among the Greek sages in being famous first as a wonder worker and founder of a way of life, and only later as a mathematician. The earliest witnesses, Xenophanes, Heraclitus and Herodotus, speak of his learning and his doctrine of rebirth and say nothing of triangles. His community split after his death into those who kept the rules and sayings and those who pursued number and music, and the second group built the reputation the first had made.
- Born: on Samos, about 570 BCE
- Taught at: Croton in southern Italy, from about 530 BCE
- Writings: none; his followers credited their work to him
- Best attested teaching: the rebirth of the soul in other bodies
- Chief ancient lives: Diogenes Laertius, Porphyry and Iamblichus, third to fourth century CE
- Modern study: Walter Burkert, Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism, German 1962, English 1972
Often mistaken for something else: Pythagoras is the man, of whom little is certain; the Pythagoreans are his school over two centuries, to whom most of the mathematics belongs.
The story behind Pythagoras
The lives of Pythagoras that survive were written by Diogenes Laertius, Porphyry and Iamblichus in the third and fourth centuries CE, some eight hundred years after him, and they are full of wonders. Plato and Aristotle speak of the Pythagoreans far more than of the man. Tradition says the community at Croton was attacked and scattered in his old age, and has him die at Metapontum about 495 BCE. In 1962 Walter Burkert showed how little of the science can be traced to Pythagoras himself.
Why Pythagoras matters
Almost every claim of sacred geometry and number lore is traced back to him, so knowing how thin the record is puts those claims in proportion.
How to read Pythagoras
Historians use the name with care, often writing of the Pythagoreans instead; number lore invokes him as the founder of whatever it teaches.
Pythagoras in practice: an example
A reader told that Pythagoras discovered the musical ratios in a smithy can try it with two hammers and find that the story does not work as told.
Where readings of Pythagoras go wrong
Sayings and systems sold under his name, modern numerology among them, were devised long after his death.
Sources and editorial method
This entry summarizes the tradition in the Almanac's own words; where no source is listed, it is an editorial summary rather than a primary text, and symbolic readings are named as the tradition's, not as fact.
- Source
- The Great Almanac Dictionary
- Category
- Mystical Systems
- Aliases
- who was pythagoras, pythagoras philosophy, pythagoras teachings, pythagoras and numbers, pythagoreans
- Last updated
- 2026-09-26
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Common questions
Who was Pythagoras?
He was a Greek teacher from Samos who founded a religious and philosophical community at Croton in southern Italy about 530 BCE. His followers studied number, music and the fate of the soul, and he left no writings.
Did Pythagoras discover the Pythagorean theorem?
The rule about the sides of a right-angled triangle was known in Babylon long before him. Later Greek writers credited him with it, but no early source says so, and nothing shows whether he or his school first proved it.
What did the Pythagoreans believe?
They held that the soul passes into new bodies after death, that a disciplined way of life purifies it, and that number is the principle of order in music and in the heavens. Their emblem was the tetractys, ten points in a triangle.
